Mr. Speaker, Quebec athletes have recently won major victories that deserve to be mentioned. Geneviève Jeanson is a cyclist who won two races in Mesa, Arizona.

Stéphane Rochon won the gold medal for parallel moguls at a World Cup freestyle event, while Pierre-Alexandre Rousseau took silver in the moguls.

Let us also congratulate the winners at the 20th edition of Quebec's Gala du mérite sportif. Weightlifter Maryse Turcotte was named female athlete of the year, while volleyball player Sébastien Ruette was named male athlete of the year. Biathlete Judith Chaput was named discovery of the year among female athletes, while champion kayaker Nicolas Beaudoin won the award on the men's side.

Figure skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier won their second victory in two weeks. The first one was in Salt Lake City and the second one in Japan.

The Bloc Quebecois congratulates these athletes for working so hard and being such good ambassadors for Quebec.

Mr. Speaker, Canadian elk and deer producers have built an exciting industry of valuable breeding stock and the promising velvet antler market.

Antler has been renowned for centuries in Asian countries for providing many general health benefits and is gaining a positive reputation in North America as a beneficial nutraceutical.

Korea and New Zealand are the largest markets for Canadian velvet antlers, but recently both countries announced a ban on antler imports due to the occurrence of chronic wasting disease on the prairies.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is confident it has the disease under control and will eradicate it. However, if this trade ban continues, the industry here will be devastated.

Today I ask the ministers of agriculture, foreign affairs and international trade to immediately begin a dialogue with Korea and New Zealand that will see this ban on Canadian elk antlers lifted as soon as possible.

Mr. Speaker, the third edition of the Gala des Jutra was held yesterday.

The gala was an opportunity to salute the efforts made in the past year by those who work in Quebec's film industry. The evening was an energetic and lively affair and a reflection of our movie industry.

I am taking this opportunity to congratulate the organizers of the event and all the winners, particularly Denis Villeneuve and Marie-Josée Croze for the movie Maelström , which won eight awards out of eight nominations. Mr. Villeneuve has already won numerous international awards. Such a success will long be remembered.

There can be no doubt that Quebec is full of talent. We must continue to support such events, because they provide a golden opportunity for exposure to our performers and to those who will follow in their footsteps.

Mr. Speaker, it is time for the government to account for the mismanagement of the first nations and Inuit health branch of Health Canada.

It is time for an external review, an independent inquiry into the administration of that department. Not to do so would be to damage efforts to resolve serious health problems in aboriginal communities and would do irreparable harm to the goal of first nations and Inuit control of their health programs.

Throughout all the developments pertaining to the Virginia Fontaine Addictions Foundation at Sagkeeng, the Anishinaabe Mino-Ayaawin in Winnipeg and now the reported deficits for the non-insured benefits program, the government has shirked its responsibilities for the problems that are emerging and has tried to create the perception of wrongdoing anywhere but in its own department.

The roots of the problem lie within the government. The facts tell a story of chaos, mismanagement, lack of accountability and disregard of numerous recommendations made by the auditor general. It is a failure of accountability and good management practices by the government and a failure to support the first nations as they have taken on transfer agreements.

Time is running out. It is time for the government to act now, to recognize that—

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Théâtre Saint-Denis was the scene for a celebration of the cinema in Quebec. It was also an opportunity to get to know our cinema better, and an invitation to aspiring filmmakers.

The 3rd Jutra awards ceremony, a gala event ably hosted by Élyse Guilbault and Yves Jacques, gave us a glimpse of the latest fine offerings in this field of endeavour in Quebec.

Tribute was paid to master filmmaker Gilles Carle for the excellence of his work. Emotions ran high as the prolific Mr. Carle—who has 47 films to his credit—was warmly applauded. Maelström , Hochelaga , La vie après l'amour , La beauté de Pandore , La Bouteille , Le petit ciel , Full Blast , The Art of War , La moitié gauche du frigo , Stardom , Possible Worlds , Les muses orphelines and more bore testimony to the original talent of Quebec's artistic colony and the ability of our creators to take our vision and make it universal.

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate Canada Lands Company for recently winning the Grand SAM Award, the most prestigious award in the Canadian land development industry which honours the best of professional marketing, advertising, promotion, sales merchandising and sales presentation.

Canada Lands winning project, Garrison Woods, is a unique urban village seven minutes from Calgary's city centre on the former Canadian Forces Base Calgary. It is an integrated community where people can live, work, play and be educated. It celebrates and reflects Calgary's military roots and heritage. Most important, Calgarians planned it in the spirit of creating a very special community during a three year consultation process.

Canada Lands Company, on behalf of Canadians, carries out its mandate on a self-funding basis, encouraging innovative property development and environmental responsibility. In this way the Canada Lands award winning team is making contributions to the economic vitality of communities all across Canada.

Mr. Speaker, today the Minister of Finance is meeting his provincial counterparts in Halifax. The main issue on the agenda is equalization.

Newfoundland and the other Atlantic provinces want changes. They want to make sure that the clawback arrangement is changed so that the federal government does not continue to claw back 75% to 90% of the resource revenues that the provinces take in.

We do not want to be the Cinderella of Canada. We do not need to be the Cinderella of Canada. We have found the glass slipper. All we want is the chance to wear it.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to make special mention of Big Sisters' Month and the organization for which it is named, which provides many services to our community.

The mission of Big Sisters is to offer girls quality relationships with responsible adult volunteers in order to assist them with their psychosocial development.

I wish to pay special tribute to the commitment of thousands of these volunteers, who give of their time, their talent and their resources, for a Big Sister is above all a friend who wants to share a few hours of her time each week with a girl from a single parent home.

A big thank you to all these individuals, who are helping to improve the quality of life of so many young people in Quebec and in Canada.

Mr. Speaker, insiders tell us the RCMP's budget for the Canadian firearms registry has been cut by 40%. Twenty verifiers already have been laid off. Scenarios of up to 100% layoffs have been discussed with staff and union officials. Meanwhile, the staff has been directed to triple output.

In the past two years the RCMP has issued only 550,000 firearms registration certificates and the current backlog is over 180,000.

There are between seven million and twenty million firearms left to register in the next two years. The registrar says that there is a 90% error rate in the applications received and that it will take until 2010 to register all the legally owned firearms in Canada.

Why is the solicitor general cutting the registry's budget and laying off staff? I wish it was because the Liberals were rethinking the billion dollars they will waste on this futile exercise and spending it on fighting real crime. Unfortunately the layoffs probably have more to do with the justice minister's privatization plans than common sense.

Mr. Speaker, hearty congratulations to three time champion, Colleen Jones, and her Mayflower curling teammates, Nancy, Mary-Anne and Kim, on their Scott Tournament of Hearts Championship.

This hat trick for Colleen Jones places her in the extraordinary company of Sandra Schmirler, Connie Laliberte and Vera Pezer. As the then MLA for Halifax Chebucto, home to the Mayflower Curling Club, I had the thrill of welcoming Colleen home after her first national win in 1982.

I regret I am unable to be in Halifax for the homecoming celebration this week, but it gives me great joy to rise in the House today to congratulate Colleen and her fabulous team and to wish them similar success in the upcoming World Curling Championship in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Sandra Schmirler's legacy lives on through Colleen's athletic successes and those whom she inspires.

Mr. Speaker, we hope to hear directly today from the Minister of Public Works and Government Services because we want to ask the question again related to the fact that the government issued a visa to Gaetano Amodeo.

Mr. Amodeo is an alleged hit man and he is on Interpol's most wanted list. Why would the government allow safe haven to one of the world's most dangerous criminals?

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about a lot more here than just visiting. It is very clear that Mr. Amodeo's wife approached the public works minister to get assistance with the visa application in spite of the fact she is not a constituent of his. The issue could not have been language because in Mrs. Amodeo's constituency, which is different from that of the public works minister, those particular services are offered in Italian by that member of parliament.

What was it and why was it that Mrs. Amodeo felt she could get some special treatment from the minister rather than from her own member of parliament?

Mr. Speaker, once again the Leader of the Opposition is wrong. I can say to him that my department received last year over 40,000 inquiries, requests for information from all members of the House.

He should also know that before anyone is granted permanent residence status in Canada, if he or she applies to the province of Quebec as an independent immigrant, under the Canada-Quebec accord Quebec must issue a selection document. That was done in this case. The processing time was the average processing time for visa posts around the world. There was nothing that was done in this case that was untoward or inappropriate.

Mr. Speaker, the situation is not usual, because the letter is not usual. This is not the letter of an MP asking about the status of a file with Immigration Canada on behalf of a citizen of the riding. The letter clearly requests that a visa be, and I quote, “issued shortly”.

Does the minister acknowledge having acted in this matter not as an MP but as an activist?

Mr. Speaker, I tabled in the House this morning the memo my riding assistant sent, and I quote it.

I can table it again for the Leader of the Opposition. “Simply to discover what stage the permanent residence file has reached with the federal government, I know that the CSQ is valid until June 2000 and that the visitor's visa is valid until 2001. Have the audits come in? And what about the medical results? Do you think the visas will be issued shortly?”

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the difficult position the minister is in and I think we want to be responsible in pursuing it. However, it does seem odd that this case ended up with the member who is not the member of parliament for the wife of this alleged mob figure. It does seem odd that the application was fast tracked after the letter was written.

Could the minister inform us if he knew this woman or her husband, the Amodeos, in any way prior to this memo being written to Immigration Canada?

Mr. Speaker, I did not know the lady. I did not know the gentleman. My office did not know her before she came to the office.

I only found out about this case as there was a note in my office the day prior to the day La Presse issued the article. That means Thursday afternoon, because the journalist called my office. Otherwise I was not even aware that the file existed.

Mr. Speaker, the whole matter has arisen because someone who is on Interpol's 500 most wanted list turns out to have been in our country since 1998. Apparently the minister of immigration knew nothing about this. Canadians are a little worried about how these crime figures could be given safe haven in our country and apparently our officials are ignorant of their whereabouts.

I ask the minister to explain to Canadians why on earth this could have happened. How could this person be in our country unknown to the minister?

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite should know that individuals from western Europe, from France, from the U.K., from Germany and from Italy do not require a visitor's visa in order to enter Canada. That has been a fact for a long time.

However, in this case, as soon as it was brought to my department's attention that this individual was wanted, within three weeks he was apprehended; he was detained; and he is awaiting a deportation hearing. That is what needed to be done and that is exactly what we did.

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Natural Resources is in Washington right now to discuss the establishment of a North American energy pact with the Americans.

Since there has never been any discussion of such negotiations here in the House of Commons, will the Prime Minister tell us what position his minister will be defending during these discussions with U.S. representatives?

Mr. Speaker, Canada and the United States have long had very amicable trade relations.

Today, the minister is going to ensure—and we have been very clear about this—that in any negotiation or agreement with any country, Canada's sovereignty and needs will always be paramount and defended as such.

As we know, however, natural resources come under provincial jurisdiction.

Will the Prime Minister, or the parliamentary secretary in this case, tell us whether the provinces were consulted with respect to the negotiations the minister is undertaking with the United States on the issue of natural resources?